I can fit you in for surgery at noon. It's 11:15 now. Who can come pick you up afterward?

After eight days of lying around miserably following my emergency eye surgery to stave off blindness in my right eye, keeping my head parallel to the floor for as much and as well as I could, I presented myself to the doctor for my one week check-up.  It did not go well.

"Your three tears in the superior region of the retina are still adhering due to the lasering I performed last week but your retina is detaching in the inferior region of your right eye, perhaps due to the inflexible nature of the scarring as the surgery heals which can produce a tension that pulls on the rest of the retina, which is a very delicate covering of the interior of the eye that has the width of only one third of a single layer of an onion skin.  You're going to need immediate additional surgery."

I was shocked and dazed at the doctor's words.  The surgery a week ago had hurt a lot, and the recovery so far had sucked, and it had all apparently been for naught.

"I can fit you in at noon today."  I looked at my watch, it was 11:15 in the morning, my second emergency surgery in eight days was in 45 minutes and I was there alone, as the friend at whose house I had been staying had gone to Florida for a family wedding the night before.

What does it mean?

Occasionally I dream about family members whom I haven't seen in years, like my parents or my children. It always features them as I remember them, frozen in time in their fifties or adolescent years.

This morning I was going through my usual anxiety dream, being at the university late in the semester trying to find out where and when my final exams were going to be held, when I hadn't been to any class since the first week, and wondering if I could pass the English exam without even knowing which books the class had read that semester.  The dream morphed into a commotion at the institution, which had changed into a Junior High school, and students were carrying a comatose fellow student up the stairs to their homeroom.

I went to help, being an adult among children, and discovered that the semi-responsive child was my oldest child as a fifteen year old (he's in his thirties now), and I picked him up and started carrying him in my arms, wondering where I should take him immediately.  My child whispered to me, "Narcotics," and I thought overdose and discovered, by placing my hand over his left side, that his heart was racing palpably.

A teacher hurried up and said, "This is our thirteenth narcotics case so far today."  Talk about an opoid crisis.

The dream ended as I was carrying my lolling son into the cafeteria where a security guard rushed up, asking me how I was related to the victim.  I proudly but worriedly said I was his father.  I hope my oldest child is well.

A Terrible Dream

I was dreaming about my 3 children again, estranged from me since the divorce 15 years ago, and the younger 2 were following me around, in their pre-teen forms, the same as the last time I had any association with them the year before their mother filed a stealth divorce petition after she took them out of town under false pretenses and refused to come back until I left the house (I "abandoned" it).  In my dream, although it has been 9 years since I have heard anything from any of them, and well over a decade since any Lamberton has had contact with them (typical PAS stuff), I had had a brief visitation with them shortly before that I remembered, feeding off a prior dream I had many months ago.

We were up on the local high school playing grounds.  I was walking slightly ahead of a tiny knot of little people and dogs, and Johnny and Danny were a small ways behind me.  I don't know where Jimmy, the oldest child, was, except that he was in the gym which we had just left to take a short walk outside.  We had rounded a corner around the bleachers and were headed back to the gym and the event inside it.

Somebody yelled out my name and hollered, "Run!"  As I looked up, I heard emergency klaxons sounding and the storm-tossed horizon above the gym was quickly filling up with fast approaching giant birds of prey, winging quickly towards the playing fields on a mission of destruction.  This was a deadly, imminent peril and people near the gym were running into it and safety.

I was 100 yards from the gym and I looked around behind me for my 2 children but all I saw behind me was a little dog.  The rest of the children had fled back behind the bleachers and, I supposed, were cowering underneath them, exposed to the depredations of the deadly claws of the giant birds.

If I ran straight for the gym I could make it there and get inside just before the predators arrived.  I was swept with indecision.  I knew I had to go back around the bleachers and find my children and try to protect and shield them from the death-dealing talons.  I stood rooted in my spot.  Already it was too late to get back to the gym.  My options were turning more and more fearsome for me.  I remembered the last visitation I'd had with my children a few months earlier, a short happy interlude.  But somehow, I argued with myself as the birds bore down on me, I know I haven't seen any child of mine in years.  I was remembering another dream within a horrible dream.

I forced myself to wake up rather than be destroyed by the airborne giant host as I ran to find my hiding  children.  As I lay in bed, in the darkness I could see dancing across the white ceiling a pattern of swiftly moving dark shapes, cast there by the dim light inside the display on my alarm clock,  projecting its customary blinking "12:00" because I never re-set it after the power last went out.  This was the source of the approaching birds of destruction filling the sky.

That was the worst dream I've had in several years,  I still remember it vividly days later.

Final Dental Visit, Part Two

The first thing that happened as I settled into the dentist's chair on my final visit, to get three permanent crowns cemented in, on three of the four far-back teeth in my mouth, two lower and one upper, was the dentist shot the particularly sensitive tooth up with Novocain.  She left so the sedation could take effect, and the technician hooked her metal prongee-thing under the temporary crown on one of the other teeth, the one on my upper left side, and jerked it off.

Zing!  "Did that hurt?" she asked.

I nodded miserably.  It was going to be one of those mornings at the dentist's office.

She wrapped the metal point of her prongee in cotton linen and gently rubbed off the residual cement from the tooth surface.  No further pain was provoked, yet.

A Concession On the Billy Goat Trail

I recently traversed the Billy Goat Trail, a 3-mile scramble over rock precipices and boulders big and small along the Potomac River in Maryland just off the C&O Canal in Great Falls Park, west of the District.  I do this traipse every year.

It's always a slog because although it's not technically hard, it is a lot of up and down, has some minor climbing and you have to be careful about your footing.

And awaiting you near the end (or at least waiting for me) is the dreaded log bridge, a twelve-foot scamper across a felled tree five feet over a rocky stream with no soft landing if you slip off.  There is a nearby footbridge but until recently, that was no option for me.

The walk across the stream atop the log has gotten more difficult though as the years pass, more uncertain and less sure, shall we say?  This year I teetered across it one more time, overcoming the trepidation and wavering balance brought on by the passage of time and upon reaching the far bank, I reflected with satisfaction my successful passage and decided that, being on the far side of sixty, I had just retired from that particular tree scramble henceforth and will take the footbridge in future years. 

I'm Afraid

When I was a policeman I learned not to show fear, or to let fear influence my actions, because in that realm fear can get you killed. So although at times I am afraid, I try not to ever show it or act upon it.

I was traveling last weekend and I went through airport security. I had barely made it through the metal detector after taking off my shoes (my toes were poking through my worn socks), my belt (my pants started creeping down my hips), my hat (my bald pate was luminous) and my jacket (revealing my untucked shirt) when a TSA guy boomed, "Sir, is this your bag?"

We were in Kansas City and the blue-shirted bag-examiner was triumphantly holding aloft a 13 oz. bottle of Arthur Bryant's Original Flavor Barbecue Sauce. Having just spent the weekend in KC, I knew from several days of taste tests that Arthur Bryant's is the preferred Kansas-style bbq sauce, even above Gates or LC's.

This cooking elixir wasn't in my carry-on bag though, it was in the bag of the guy behind me. I think he was trying to sneak this bottle of liquid amber gold past TSA to take it home and liven up his dinner fare.

He owned up to ownership, declined to go back through the onerous security line again after removing the offending item from the security area and offered it to the guard, who put it in a bus pan by the back window. This receptacle of prohibited items was chock full.

I sidled over to that window from the other side once I cleared the security and looked at the contraband through the glass. Inside the brimming pan were a dozen or more sealed bottles and cans of Arthur Bryant's sauce, Gatorade, purified water, Red Bull and Coke, along with shrink-wrapped tubes of shampoo conditioner and sundry makeup.

I was sorely tempted to take a picture through the window of this basket of shame to record what is going on in the fight against terrorism in the heartland of the homeland. But I was afraid that snapping a photo of the bucket of discarded items would be a "suspicious activity" that might get me questioned and perhaps put on a no-fly list.

I was greatly conflicted but I decided against the photograph. The Decider would be proud for having been successful in making me afraid.

Twenty-five inches.

Local friends and family, please stop calling, I haven't expired. And yes, I have run out of things to shovel.

In Falls Church we got 25 inches of snow over two days. Obama termed it Snowmageddon. The fourth largest snowfall ever in DC. But this is DC, not Colorado (where I used to live).

Some young newscaster, in local-coverage's twenty-four hour breathless live tracking of the storm's progress, cautioned viewers that such a heavy snow (20-1 water content) is known as "Heart Attack Snow."

Well, I never heard that before. Yes, I know people keel over while shoveling snow. Oops! But I think you made that up, young man.

Anyway, you can stop calling to check up on me. I'm sore but fine. I even shoveled a path from the end of the block through the snow wall to the route to the Metro Station. Come on by instead and see the eight-foot snow banks I created by tossing dozens of cubic-yard blocks of frozen ice chunks up atop the pile. It was fun.

I've joined

I was dragged into the new century today because I had to add word moderation (requiring a word recognition pause) to the comment section of my blog. Sorry!

Anonymous was getting out of hand about his investment opps, "school" projects, Vegas fun, adult sites, conspiracy theories and more. I was deleting two or three of his "comments" a day.

I dislike censorship in any form, and I am chary of leaving my own comments on moderated comment sections (where the owner has to approve them first) and I find word recognition pauses to be time consuming and frustrating because I can't make out some of those bizarre, run together letter combinations. Oh well.

It's the world we live in, where nothing is free or innocent or fair or easy and system momentum seems to operate against purely "having fun." Live forever in hell with all the divorce lawyers, Anonymous.

Got debt?

I received a strange phone call yesterday. I'm home this week on annual leave.

Ms. Chisum called, and using my first name, asked how I was doing. Since I don't know any Ms. Chisum, I was immediately suspicious.

She wanted to know if had a neighbor by the name of, let's say, Juan Gonzalez. I asked why.

Instead of answering my question, she drew out the conversation. She correctly said that I lived on [street name and number], and continued, "And Mr. Gonzalez lives at, I want to say... I want to say... [street name and number], right?" That is the correct address for the house next door.

I said, "You must be a bill collector."

She said,"No." I'm pretty sure she was lying at this point, but perhaps she was denying that she "must" be a bill collector.

I said I didn't know the name of who lived next door. She asked if I would go post a note on their door.

At that house, there has been a succession of yearly tenants, usually several unrelated adults with children sometimes present. There have been a few police visits to the house over the years, with at least one being in response to an alleged shooting there.

Last year I had my garage spray painted with a gang sign, the numeric designation of an urban semi-automatic gun. I have my suspicions who did it since there was a large party going on next door on that weekend day when I drove away at noon, and the party was over and the obscene symbol was on my garage wall a few hours later when I returned.

I asked Ms. Chisum what the note would say. You like to be helpful. Perhaps the occupant's wife was in labor in Bolivia or something and he needed to call home.

Ms. Chisum said, "It would just contain my name and number, with a note asking Mr. Gonzalez to call."

I asked her if she was a bill collector. There was a long silence and then Ms. Chisum said, "I already said no to your earlier question."

I declined to undertake the requested action and the call terminated.

In my profession, I deal with the Fair Debt Collections Practice Act ("FDCPA"), a statute written by Congress which prohibits debt collectors from engaging in a laundry list of abusive practices like smearing an individual's name by calling up his or her neighbors (or employers--sometimes repeatedly) and alerting them to the supposed presence of a deadbeat in their midst. I referred to the wording of the statute and found that Ms. Chisum either did, or did not, violate the statute if she was a debt collector, which I'm pretty sure she was.

She was entitled to call me up if she was genuinely trying to locate the actual address of the deadbeat. She cannot state to an unrelated party that the purpose of the call involves an attempt to collect a debt. She has to give her name. So far Ms. Chisum complied.

If directly asked, she has to disclose the name of her employer. I asked how she was employed, not who her employer was. It would do me little good if she said to me, "I work for the ABC Company."

I consulted with a fellow lawyer who said that theoretically my question whether she was a debt collector triggered Ms. Chisum's duty under that part of the statute to truthfully respond, putting her in violation of the FDCPA. I'm not sure I agree with that, but this attorney agreed with me that neither of us would go to court to try to cite this set of facts as being clearly violative of the FDCPA.

This attorney also said that Ms. Chisum was very professional and acted correctly by not disclosing to me that Mr. Gonzalez was a deadbeat. Which would have been apparent if she had confirmed that she was a debt collector.

See how vague this statute, like many statutes, is? Ms. Chisum was lying to me, but fulfilling the spirit of the law. Where does that leave me, the innocent recipient of this legally allowable call?

I know this much. If I was naive and eager to help without first ascertaining all the facts (the "wife giving birth in Bolivia" scenario), I could go post the requested note next door and step right into the middle of an acrimonious financial dispute. This would be a great thing to unleash in a neighborhood.

Imagine this scenario. I post the supposedly innocuous note on my neighbor's door. Mr. Gonzalez comes home at midnight, having put in a hard day's work followed by a full evening of relaxation at a tavern. He's handed a note which he sees as a demand by a debt collection company to call them, which has been taped onto his door by his next-door neighbor.

I'd sure like to hear pounding on my door at midnight, forcing me to arise from bed so I could go discuss on my porch the note I'd posted hours earlier on my enraged neighbor's door in an attempt to be helpful.

Did I already say it's a vague (in parts) statute?

You Gotta Love Cable

My first cable bill arrived--$167. (That includes Internet and phone service everywhere in NA.) That's up from around $67 when I didn't have cable (only a local landline and Internet).

So what have I watched now that I'm a couch potato? Well, I get HBO "free" for 90 days but I have only found it/watched it once, when I stumbled across a riveting documentary on the Mumbai massacre, using intercepted recorded cell phone calls of the the Muslim terrorists being urged on by their handlers to go find some Jews to especially kill, because that would be even "fifty times better" than the run-of-the-mill mayhem they were perpetrating by just gunning down Indians and tourists. It just made me mad and feel like "those folks" are out to kill me. (No, I'm not Jewish.) My friends chide me to be more tolerant but I dunno.

I think I have 1999 choices (many are radio channels that play over TV). At least you have to go past "1999" to surf the listings and get back to "1." I watch football on weekends at channels 2, 4, 5 or 7. I go to ESPN on Monday nights. Other than that, when I'm up I go to the Comedy Channel at 11 pm to watch Jon Stewart, and I watch the history channel. Over and over. That's it. Nothing else is worth sitting there for an hour for.

I have learned about the two thousand year history of beer. I know a lot of things about Jesus Christ now, and several other early biblical figures like Noah. Boy, was he old. I can't wait til they get the Ark down off that mountain in Turkey where it's at. The RAF is always battling the Luftwaffe, and the Nazis are always overreaching in Europe and sealing their fate. And the Allies are always surmounting the incredible difficulties of landing in Normandy. And the battles in Korea raged back and forth with little change in the lines ultimately. Except for the beer part, and the biblical figures part, I already knew a lot of this stuff from reading books.

Is this $100 well spent?

Access Denied

I had a cathartic visit this weekend with an old running buddy of mine, Bex, who moved away to California a couple of years ago. I admire her and listen to her counsel closely. She advised me to move on. (Right: Bex at the Lake Tahoe Relay.)

So I am not going to post the long memo I sent last summer to the club's director of training outlining my vision for the club's training program, the one he ignored and actively subverted with the assistance of his buddies. I am not going to relate the details of the profane late-night phone call I received, or how the president's blog was removed from the front page of the club's website, or answer the charge that I engaged in "passive-aggressive attacks on other board members." (It was a novelty to have a man accuse me of being passive-aggressive.)

Contractual information was withheld from me, I couldn't get information about who suddenly published different bylaws on the club's website, and the club veeps I asked declined to assist me in getting the president's blog restored to its traditional spot. They also refused to investigate and report to me on whether there'd been co-mingling with a club account.

My presidential authority having thus been rendered nugatory, this month's board meeting became a debacle when I had four club members openly dissing me practically to the point of a melee. I took full responsibility for the breakdown of the meeting because I was the president. I resigned.

I'll reaffirm a truism--bullies are cowards.

Everyone there made their choices that day. I'm moving on.

But Shane, there's too many.

The last six months have not been fun. The last sixty days, when I was alone in dealing with three insubordinate board members and a fourth buddy of theirs who were actively usurping the running club, were intolerable. I lost the struggle to these Generation-Y bad-boys because I received no support from the board. So I did the honorable thing by resigning the presidency. I go home and sleep at night.

The key sentence in my resignation letter was, "The refusal of key board members to furnish me with requested information has prevented me from properly monitoring the club activities for which I am putatively responsible." Crucial information was deliberately withheld from me by a couple of the bad boys, and by other board members as well. Over a series of posts I’ll document how it all went down. Let’s call the series, "Access Denied."

During the struggle I pretty much felt like I did during the worst days of my divorce, which cost me a quarter million dollars and my kids to PAS. But these bad boys who are half my age are mere chump-change compared to the battery of unscrupulous or worse divorce lawyers and "professionals" that my ex-wife threw at me while she was "winning." The children lost, that's all I know.

So these guys "won." The club lost, that's all I know. Life goes on. Maybe I'll actually start running again.

Free at last.

You might recall that I felt honored to assume the presidency of my running club half a year ago. Here's what I sent to my club's board earlier this week.

Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 5 p.m.

To the [name of club] Board,

Unfortunately, I feel that I can no longer properly discharge my
special responsibilities as President of the club, which includes
being in general charge of the business, affairs, and property of the
club. The refusal of key board members to furnish me with requested
information has prevented me from properly monitoring the club
activities for which I am putatively responsible. Therefore for
personal reasons, and in the best interests of the club, I hereby
resign, effective at 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 7, 2009.

The new President will be [name], the current Vice President of
Operations. I have already spoken with her about this. [She] has
been very active in the club and on the board, and she is a past
recipient of the Justine Peet Volunteer of the Year Award. She will
be a fine and capable successor and she has my complete confidence.

I leave behind a club that is even stronger than when I assumed the presidency, with several important associations and programs either implemented or expanded during my tenure. It has been my honor and pleasure to serve both the club members and the Washington running community for the past several years as a volunteer coach, as the director for several club training programs, as a board member and as club President. I am especially proud that I am a past recipient of the Justine Peet Volunteer of the Year Award.

I will naturally support [the new President's] transition in any way I can, and I can be reached at [this email address]. Thank you for your
continued support of the club.

Peter

We cannot walk alone.

I haven't been running much the last six months, ever since I assumed the presidency of my running club, even before I got injured at Army. (I haven't run since.) Too busy.

However, being a site director for my club's Ten-Miler Program, I did run about ten miles each Saturday with my trainees, and then about ten more the next day in support of the Sunday site director. That was like my guilty pleasure.

But as president, in addition to the public stuff I detailed in the last post that were accomplished on my watch in the last six months, along with writing the club newsletter every eight weeks, there were the hidden every-day occurrences I administered to like attending innumerable meetings with finance committees, race directors, advisory boards, etc., communicating with countless persons in endless phone calls and emails, maintaining club property such as undertaking several trips in the club van to get it fixed after a RD damaged it in an accident, driving around the beltway in my pickup to pick up 15 boxes of racing t-shirts and deliver them early the next morning, going to a race packet pickup site to restore order when no one showed up for over an hour except for five dozen increasingly angry runners, participating in the ATM Expo to answer questions about pacing, safeguarding the runners' bags in the club tent at the MCM finish line during those lonely hours when the club runners were out on the course...well, you get the idea.

And then there was one last meeting earlier today to hand over the reins of power for the last six months of my reign (I just made a series of jokes, BTW) to the club VP of Ops so she could be the adult in the sandbox for the rest of the way.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it best when he said, "We cannot walk alone." He concluded that iconic speech by reciting, "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

That's pretty much how I feel about it.

Roswell

I have a family member who contracted Hep-C from a blood transfusion she underwent when her oldest child was born, because she lost so much blood during delivery. In those days blood largely came from paid donors, including many drug addicts who sold their blood for ready cash so they could shoot up some more. For two decades afterwards she went undiagnosed although she told doctors that something was wrong with her. They merely labeled her a hypochondriac. Finally when she was in her 50s her condition was diagnosed correctly, her husband divorced her, she underwent a year of grueling chemotherapy and now, since she was a live-at-home Mom, she doesn't benefit from America's work-driven health insurance programs.

So now she has a pre-existing condition, which isn't her fault, and although she has dedicated her life since her divorce to getting a job with health insurance benefits, no employer who offers health insurance will hire her because she is approaching the age of 60. (This is the richest nation ever on earth.)

Her only practical option is to become a pauper so that when her house is gone and all her possessions are in her siblings' garages, the government can take her in and administer minimal health care to her that she can't otherwise afford til she dies.

Who in the world doesn't want the Public Option?

Stormy

Suddenly breaking into a run, Stormy took off at a fast clip up the hillside. I held on as well as I could, bouncing up and down in the saddle while I maintained a death grip upon the pommel with one hand. I held the reins with my other.

Branches from the close-in spruce trees on both sides of the trail lashed my face. I was reviewing my life as it flashed before my eyes when I remembered the advice my cousin Liz gave to me before we left the meadow of her Colorado high-country home about turning Stormy in a circle if he started to get away from me.

You see, Stormy has attitude. He doesn't brook fools or tenderfoots. I might be a fool too, but I clearly was a novice, not having been on horseback for thirty years. As passing evergreen limbs threatened to sweep me off of Stormy's back, I pulled back on one rein.

Before the ride, Liz had saddled Stormy for me and offered to get a footstool so I could use it to mount the gelding. That's western-speak for, You're a dude, man.

I declined the stool but I did take Liz's advice about demonstrating who was in charge to Stormy. Before I climbed aboard, I spent a minute pressed in close to the big horse, leading him around in a tight circle by gently pulling his halter to one side and forcing him around with my body. Now as the hilltop loomed, I viewed that as a minute well spent.

Stormy's head came around in response to my pressure on the bit and he went into a turn. He slowed down to a walk.

Liz, who rides every day, trotted up on her horse and said, "Well done, Peter. Stormy tested you and now he respects you." I just beamed for the rest of our slow and peaceful ride through the beautiful and quiet National Forest, observing deer and wild turkeys and passing over bear scat.

Boom, down. More Books.

I have a friend who can't believe the books I read. "What war book are you reading now," she'll ask. "Lots of people dying in them?"

I don't think she thinks it's a good thing I read histories and political tracts. "When was the last time you read a fiction book," she asked. I had to think awhile. October, it was. The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry. A great movie and a very good book. I'm currently reading another McMurtry book, Terms of Endearment, but I keep misplacing it. My 1100 page Korean War history, having so much more heft, is so much easier to keep track of.

I always list a classic American novel in my profile book section. Two years ago it was my favorite American book of them all, The Scarlet Letter, a book filled with gorgeous writing. Last year it was Moby Dick. Call me Ishmael. This year's favorite is The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald could certainly write. I love his Tender is the Night, too.

I pay homage to great biography too. Two years ago it was Russell Baker's Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography, Growing Up. Last year it was U.S. Grant's Personal Memoirs, the best war memoir ever written. This year I'm listing Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester's memoir of the Pacific War. A Marine who was grievously wounded on Okinawa (a Japanese shell burst nearby and shrapnel and bone fragments from the man blown apart next to him were driven into his body), thirty years later he traveled back across those gory Marine battlefields, the Canal, Tarawa, Saipan, Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. The range of emotions that passes through this journalist as he describes his younger self experiencing his first lay, his first drunk, his first death, his first kill, is incredible and unforgettable. My father was a Marine at Peleliu and Okinawa.

Replacing J.M. Coetzee's book Waiting for the Barbarians as just great literature is Tim O'Brien's novel In The Lake of the Woods. I first became enamored with O'Brien's writing when I read The Things They Carried, his Vietnam opus. O'Brien was there and walked the walk. He explained the grunts' war effort thusly:

They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier's greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point . . . . It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.

After reading this elegant book, I read In The Lake of the Woods. It is a terrific book, a puzzling, haunting mystery, a whodunit love story about relationships gone bad that has no resolution, only suggestions and suppositions, where events in the past blur into the present and may, or may not, point to the future. A brilliant work in my opinion.

The Old Soft Shoe Routine

I agree with Jay Leno that we finally found something the Decider is really good at, dodgeball. I'll bet he was a schoolyard whiz at dodging in grade school. I'll bet at Yale he could really execute those cheerleader flips. If he had been around during the Vietnam War, when he was a pilot in the National Guard but seemingly absent, I'll bet he could really corkscrew those jets into tight turns and dizzying dives.

He exhibited extraordinary reflexes in deftly dodging both on-target shoes thrown at his face from a short distance away by an enraged Iraqi journalist. I presume that fellow is not representative of his countrymen and women, and how did he get both shoes off so quickly?

I stand with the Decider on this one. He done us proud in his moment under actual fire. I guess he has HTFU a little since that day in September seven years ago when he flew all over the country, perhaps following the Great Bird Hunter's orders, looking for the deepest bunker he could hunker down in until the all-clear sounded.

What division he has introduced into the country! I recently saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that read, "[The Decider] Runs The Country." I didn't exactly know what message the guy was trying to convey and felt like asking him if the saying wasn't missing an "i," as in "[The Decider] Ruins The Country." But change is coming so I kept silent.

The recent election didn't help the divisiveness much (aside from the outcome). I was recently running with a fellow I don't know really well and we were talking about Sarah Palin's church in Wasilla being firebombed. I said I thought it was absolutely despicable, dangerous, destructive and potentially deadly, and the perpetrator should be prosecuted. My running mate agreed and said how magnanimous Palin showed herself to be in issuing a statement apologizing if the arson was connected to the "undeserved negative attention" she garnered by running for national election. I disagreed with this characterization of her and said the statement showed that she won't let any opportunity pass to sling aspersions at the press. We fell into silence and he shortly remembered a cut-off just ahead that he had always meant to explore.

Thanks Decider. Or is that Divider?

My best 3-miler ever

I was unable to move, enveloped deep within the recesses of the narrow MRI chamber with a wall of curvy metal sweeping past my face. A loud buzzing noise came on.

I closed my eyes and drifted off. Periodical silences would intervene, punctuated by a series of loud clicks as the camera readjusted again. Occasionally a technician would ask me over the intercom how I was doing. Since I couldn’t give them a thumbs up, I would always say “Fine.”

They had said I would be in there for about twenty minutes. I know exactly how long twenty minutes is. It is how long it takes me to run to the schoolyard from my house and back again, a mile and a quarter each way. I have done it hundreds of times. Eight minute miles, ten minutes up, ten minutes back.

So I walked to the end of my driveway. Since I never stretch, I just punched my Timex and took off. I ran down the sidewalk past my neighbor’s house. He never picks up his free weekly newspaper, and there it was in his yard. I ran by my realtor’s house next, on the other side of the street. What was his wife's name? I can never remember. I passed by the parking lot of the strip mall, the one with the Bikram studio. The yoga people weren't out and about yet, mats tucked under their arms. The arterial road at the end of my street lay ahead, just past the stop sign a block further on .

I attained the secondary artery and turned right. It was a mile to the school yard from there, up the big hill a third of a mile away and around a couple of slight bends to the left.

Many of the houses I went by had a little bit of history for me. There was the house where I dropped off some misdelivered mail once while on a run, pictures from a wedding apparently, and the occupant was so grateful. I ran by the decrepit ramshackle house where my middle child used to play with his friend. This bittersweet memory was disturbing to me so I mentally shook it off and glided on. Slowly I topped the first rise on the run and ran down the slight decline beyond it.

The small colonial-era graveyard lay off to the right, St. James Cemetery. That was my father's name, and it is my oldest son's name. In the hollow below lay a creek, the low point of my run. I crossed over it and glanced at the name place sign, Tripp's Run. I thought of Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinski's supposed friend and confidante who conspired to use the young intern to try to bring down the Clinton presidency. Word associations frequently occupy me whenever I run.

I started up the big hill, three-tenths of a mile long. It takes awhile to run a block in real time, even if you don’t notice it when you’re actually running, and I was in no hurry now. Inside the buzzing chamber, I thought that about three minutes had passed. I was satisfied with the progress of my run so far. More importantly, I was not focusing on the loud rasping noise assailing me and I was at peace as I lay still within the narrow tube.

Going up the big hill, steep at first, gentle in the middle and then steep again at the top, I ran by the house where the little dog always runs up and down the fence whenever I go by, barking at me. I hadn’t seen him for awhile. He didn’t come out again, and I hoped he was alright.

The hill evened out for a bit, then got steep again. This meant that I was passing the white-columned houses on the left and the top of the hill loomed ahead. Here I sidled across the road on a long diagonal to my left, cutting off a bit of the crest. The road dipped to the left beyond the summit and I ran down past the intersection that lies one and half kilometres from my house, the turnaround point for my 3K runs whenever I train for my monthly Tidal Basin race. A block further on I hit the mile marker and I checked my watch. About 8:10, I imagined. Damn hill. Now I needed to make up eleven seconds in the next mile and a half.

Around a further curve to the left, the school yard opened up before me. I ran to the top of the parking lot, eschewing backpedaling in this open protected area. Sometimes I pretend to be an NFL cornerback here, running backwards while keeping pace with a swift receiver, but not today because I was slightly behind schedule. I turned around and went back around the curves, down the long hill, past the creek, up my block and got back to my driveway. 19:50, hot damn!

The loud noise was still filling the chamber. Rather than be there, I slowed down for a cooldown jog, something I never do. I ran to the end of my block, where I used to wait with my oldest son for his school bus. I turned left to circle the block and ran past the house where my youngest played on the trampoline in the backyard. I wondered if it was still there. Next I ran down the slight decline where my middle child wiped out once on his razor scooter. I passed by the antique pickup truck emblazoned with Jesus Saves signs. I circled back to my driveway and arrived back, relaxed and loose from the slower paced recovery run. The buzzing was still surrounding me.

I walked down my driveway past my pickup. My backyard was strewn with fallen leaves. I checked beneath my towering old oak tree to see if any more branches had come down during the night. The ground underneath was clear.

The buzzing in my ears stopped. A voice said, "The test is over. You're coming out now."

I felt movement, then stillness again. I opened my eyes. The room's ceiling lights were high overhead. Two technicians helped me sit up.

"You were wonderful in there. You lay so still."

"How long was I in there?"

"About twenty-five minutes."

I smiled, happy and relaxed. "I went for a run," I explained. "I ran three miles in twenty-five minutes."

They didn't know what I was talking about. It was as real a run as I have ever been on. I'm counting those three miles in my weekly total.

Put inside the MRI tube

Two days ago, I posted about the preparations I underwent for the MRI of my bad shoulder.

After the dye injection into my shoulder socket for a contrast medium, it was time for me to be inserted into the MRI chamber. This is a long cylindrical tube the body is slid into for the magnetic resonant imaging. It is a tight fit in order to reduce the background interference during the scan which degrades the image. You must lie very still in there or else the image will not be clear. Claustrophobia is a problem.

I laid down on my back on a long narrow platform and the technicians gave me earplugs and said I would be in there about twenty minutes. They warned me that it would be noisy. Next they wrapped me tightly in a swaddling sheet, not so much to bind me as to confine me so I wouldn’t move. They advised me to keep my eyes closed, told me to relax and slid me in.

I did not like it in there at all. It was well lit but the curving metal wall was only a quarter inch from my face. I couldn’t even raise my head a bit to look down the length of my body. I could sense the narrowness of the enveloping tube around my body.

I started thinking of the people who had been trapped in confined spaces by tons of rubble at the collapsed Twin Towers. I imagined that if I screamed, they’d pull me back out. I sure couldn’t raise my arms to start pounding on the metal sides of the contraption for attention. I wondered if I yelled and nobody came, if I could wiggle out feet first. I thought that egress that way would be very slow, glacial even, if I could keep myself calm.

There were several loud clicks, as the camera adjusted, I suppose. A technician came on the intercom and said to lie very still, that they were about to take the first picture and it would be noisy for around two minutes.

A loud buzzing noise came on and stayed on. It sounded like being inside a microwave. I thought about how long twenty minutes would be. I closed my eyes rather than peer at a wall of curving white metal sweeping around my face.

Next: The dreamy state.